Ratings & Reviews

Ratings & Reviews

Asked to do a safari-documentation, Kubelka folds - in an amazingly excessive work of cutwork - the recordings in on themselves, contrasting video and audio in a way that opens up perspectives on postcolonial decadence and the modes of nonfictional and nostalgic film.

A film print just screened at Alternative Film/Video Belgrade, within a Kubelka retrospective programmed by Gerald Weber of Sixpack Films (Austria). Well-regarded masterpiece. Felt like the missing link between early ethnographic film and modernist revisions of the form by the likes of Trinh T. Minh-ha and others. Won't be surprised to see Sixpack Film release a DVD collection of all of Kubelka's work someday.

Unsere Afrikareise, an ode to the displacement/juxtaposition of sound and film, and how sound tarnishes or enhances meaning, even if the sound is not the one pertaining to the action depicted. Innovative, but the obsession of Austrian fringe filmmakers of the time with form over content doesn't really do it for me. However, I find more of an emotional connection in this film than in Arnulf Rainer and Adebar.